Quoted By:
What you posted is a tree from the study of philology, which is definitely scientific. Languages evolve in surprisingly static ways, and it's absolutely fair to compare different languages and come up with language phylogeny. In fact, the same methods used to reconstruct PIE were used to construct latin rules from romantic languages, and reconstructed latin was found to be iirc ~70% accurate to actual latin. Include 4x or 5x as many languages, as well as additional linguistic-evolutionary data, and reconstructed PIE is probably very similar to actual PIE.
As far as actual linguistics go, idk
